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The BnF, the National Library of France, has signed a new deal with the Jouve-Safig-Diadeis partnership for the digitization of its print collections. As the principal representative of the operation, the Jouve Group will work in partnership with Safig, Diadeis, and the subcontractor BancTec, to digitize more than 70,000 works per year, of which around 70% will come from the print collections of the BnF and 30% from the collections of partner libraries. Financed by the Centre national du livre, the agreement is for a 3-year period, renewable for 1 year after.

The previous agreement was signed in 2007 with a Safig-BancTec-Diadeis partnership. It allowed the digitization and OCR (optical character recognition) of 36.6 million pages.

The new deal will offer very high standards of quality: 400 DPI resolution, digitization in color or greyscale, a minimal guaranteed OCR standard of 98.5% for documents produced after 1750, and 20% of documents digitized with high quality OCR (99.9%). In addition, at least 10% of documents will be provided in an ePUB version, compatible with mobile e-readers.

The documents will enrich Gallica, the BnF’s digital library. They will cover a range of subjects, including French history, art, French literature, philosophy, law, economics, politics, science, and technology.